Monday, March 20, 2017

Today science fiction and fantasy writer Mary Fan graciously interviewed me at her blog, Zigzag Timeline. I ramble about writing andmy novelette, The Lilies of Dawn. I also fangirled hard for writer Sofia Samatar, one of my writing heroes, and a major influence and inspiration for The Lilies of Dawn.If you're curious, you can check out the interview here:

Sunday, March 19, 2017

I have been listening to
sad songs in languages I cannot understand. It started when I stumbled on a
Twitter link to this song. I cannot understand Mandarin; I had
not, until recently, ever followed either of the musical artists featured in
the video. I am not in exile, far from home and family. And yet I’ve been
obsessed with this song of homesickness, listening over and over to the ache in
the vocals, the clear longing in every line.*

There is a word in
Portuguese for longing. Months ago, I stumbled upon this BBC travel articledescribing it: saudade.
Saudade is untranslatable, writer Eric Weiner asserts before translating it
thus:

Saudade
is a longing, an ache for a person or place or experience that once brought
great pleasure. It is akin to nostalgia but, unlike nostalgia, one can feel
saudade for something that’s never happened, and likely never will.

At
the heart of saudade lies a yawning sense of absence, of loss. Saudade, writes
scholar Aubrey Bell in his bookIn
Portugal,is “a vague and
constant desire for something. . . other than the present.”

That’s it, I thought
when I learned this word. That’s what I’ve felt all my life. A longing for
something, some place. . . else.

I remember when I felt
this most keenly. After college, I moved straight to a new city for graduate
school, and like many grad students I felt lost and unmoored for the first
years. I missed my college friends; I missed the network I’d built up there,
the sense of familiarity and structure. I didn’t know what I was doing in my
new field of study; I felt that I was floundering. I missed home deeply. And
yet “home” wasn’t the college I’d just left--that world was over and done. I
didn’t want to return. And “home” wasn’t the town where I’d grown up; it wasn’t
my family there.

But I was homesick,
deeply, helplessly. Homesick for where? For what?

The city’s light rail
transit system had a station at the university medical campus where I was
studying. I passed that station every day as I walked to and from my apartment
and the research laboratory where I worked. It was the last station before the
airport, where the train line ended. I remember walking past that station in
the evenings, sunsets burning above the train tracks, dramatic swirls of red
and pink amidst the gray block buildings of the medical center. Each evening I
imagined boarding a train for the airport, buying a plane ticket at random, and
jetting off forever into that sunset sky for some unknown country, never to
come back.

I never did this, of
course. And things got better, as they usually do. I met someone, and years
later I’ve made a home with him. Yet still, off and on, underneath my
contentment, underneath the placid surface of my days, I’ll feel a thin current
of longing. A vague yearning for elsewhere, for a place I
don’t know and can’t even describe.

I think of how
existential longing is threaded through so many of the stories I write. A
selkie-girl longs for the sea. A snow-maiden longs to be human. Children raised
on the Moon yearn to return to Earth. These are fairy tales of impossible
longings, longings which can seemingly never be resolved.

In real life, longing is
often so painful. But what about it makes us seek it in art? Why is longing at
the heart of so many of our most beloved songs, movies, books, and stories?

You
need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That's
what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That's being
a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that
empty—forever empty.

Forever
empty. It's one way to describe it, this sadness, this yearning, this
existential loneliness at the heart of being human. And I agree with Louis and
Meade here: that so much of our distracted behavior is simply a way to not feel
that emptiness. Obsessive checking of iPhones (I do this!), eating, drinking,
drugs, sex, working 60+ hours a week. . . It's a way to not feel, to forget the
loneliness, the ineradicable darkness beneath.

I think this why we seek out sadness in art. Sad songs and books and movies and
stories—they give us permission to sit with the sadness, to experience it in a
safe way and even share it with others. American culture does not encourage
sitting alone with one’s sadness. That doesn’t look productive, after all.
We’re encouraged to be happy, positive, and as productive as possible. To push
the darkness away from us as much as we can.

But
we can feel it through art. That’s socially sanctioned; that’s okay. Fun is
good. Contributing to the entertainment industry with our dollars is good.
Having fun in a way that also taps into that undercurrent of sadness? That’s
also. . . okay.

More
than okay.

Saudade
can be pleasurable, that BBC article asserts.The Portuguese
even celebrate a kind of “joyful sadness” to be found in saudade. The writer of
the BBC piece interviews a Portuguese clinical psychologist, Mariana Miranda:

Sadness
is an important part of life, she told me, adding that she can’t understand why
anyone would avoid it.

“‘I
want to feel everything in every possible way. Why paint a painting with only
one colour?" By avoiding sadness at all costs, she said, we diminish
ourselves. “There is actually lot of beauty in sadness.”

I
think there’s truth in what this woman said. There’s truth in what Lindsey
Meade writes in her blog:

It’s through sitting
with the emptiness, eschewing the behaviors that numb us to the darkness at the
core of this life, that we learn to be human.

And yes, sometime the
sadness is too much and leaves us unable to function. But I’m not talking about
that. I’m not talking about clinical depression, and neither are the writers
I’ve cited here. I’m just talking about that base level of sadness, of
unavoidable loneliness. That sense of homelessness even when we are at home
warm and safe with our loved ones; a sense, for me, that manifests as an
inarticulate longing for a home I’ve never known, which I know doesn’t exist,
and yet which I still vaguely intuit.

A place of belonging, true belonging,
which I think is not possible for us, we sentient beings with our individual
consciousnesses, separate from the world and from each other.**

I think that to long
for something is to be alive. I think sometimes we need to sit with that
oft-buried sadness to remember this, to be fully alive.

_____________________________________________________

*The rapper in the
video is Namewee, a Malaysian-Chinese musical artist. The pretty one with the
aching vocals is Leehom Wang, an American-born singer/songwriter/actor of
Taiwanese heritage. Both men are apparently Big Deals in Asia, particularly
Leehom Wang who is a mega-star of the Chinese pop music scene. The music video
here is about exile, about migrant workers in Beijing. But it’s also
easy to read this song (written by Namewee) as Namewee’s own story of leaving
Malaysia (Google it), and to also consider that Wang, too, is no longer in the land
of his birth.

**I think of this line
from the first elegy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Steven Mitchell's translation)